Integrating a simplified emission estimation model and mesoscopic dynamic traffic simulator to efficiently evaluate emission impacts of traffic management strategies

•Integrate a simplified emission estimation model and mesoscopic dynamic traffic simulator.•Cross-resolution representation based on simplified kinematic wave and linear car following models.•Evaluate network-wide traffic dynamics and vehicle emission/fuel consumption impact.•Construct effective microscopic and macroscopic traffic stream representations.

This paper presents a computationally efficient and theoretically rigorous dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) model and its solution algorithm for a number of emerging emissions and fuel consumption related applications that require both effective microscopic and macroscopic traffic stream representations. The proposed model embeds a consistent cross-resolution traffic state representation based on Newell’s simplified kinematic wave and linear car following models. Tightly coupled with a computationally efficient emission estimation package MOVES Lite, a mesoscopic simulation-based dynamic network loading framework DTALite is adapted to evaluate traffic dynamics and vehicle emission/fuel consumption impact of different traffic management strategies.